Scottish government policymakers understanding of natural capital – survey data collected in 2025

The dataset is a set of responses to the survey which aimed to explore Scottish policy-makers’ understanding of natural capital and related concepts.  It is a repeat of a survey carried out 2 years earlier, in late 2023, whose data was already archieved and is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12205590 

The survey was open between late September and mid-December 2025 and collected 49 responses.  It was hosted online, via the Qualtrics platform, and distributed to policy-makers within the Scottish Government.  It asked questions about the policymakers’ job role, professional background, familiarity with Natural capital, familiarity with a tool called ENCA (Enabling a Natural Capital Approach), and the aims and challenges of embedding environmental sustainability considerations in decision-making. A mixture of open and closed (mostly Likert scale) questions were used, so this dataset contains a mix of categorical, ordinal and qualitative text responses.

We have removed potentially-identifying information from this dataset, mostly relating to details of their job roles. However, we have provided some new recoded variables which summarise some of this professional information. The variable descriptions make clear which variables are the new recoded variables.

Respondents were free to skip certain questions - blank cells show where no responses were recorded.

This survey is part of the project titled ‘Galvanising change via Natural Capital’, project JHI-D5-3 funded by Scottish Government’s 2022-2027 Strategic Research Programme. If you would like to read more, you can visit the project website here.  This will be maintained for at least the duration of the original award (until March 2027).